Welcome to Bottles of Djinn, the Web’s #1 source for entertaining, inspirational, and generally useful information, all specifically designed to support the supernatural world’s endless war against mundane reality. Like it or not, the Djinn, former undisputed masters of this world, are reawakening all across the globe. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the world as you know it…

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“Every proper escape begins not with a plan,
but with an awareness of one's current captivity.”

These words were first written to me by a mysterious stranger who called himself “Desmious,” which, I eventually learned, was not his proper name at all, but, rather, the Greek word for 'Prisoner.' Although I never learned his real name, or even met the man face-to-face (assuming, of course, that he was a man), the few things that I did learn from him have proven invaluable, so much so that today I feel compelled to share some it here with all of you; I hope you're paying attention.

You see, Desmious claimed to have started out many, many, years ago, as an amateur escape artist. Obsessed from a very young age with the fundamental architecture of prisons, and of systems of control in general, he quickly rose up to become the greatest master of the slip that this world had ever seen, unsurpassed at finding, and exploiting, previously undetected weaknesses in all manner of confinements, entanglements, and oppressions. He had become so good at escape, in fact, that he was eventually inducted into a vast world dominating Conspiracy, one where he was to serve as a sort of quality control consultant for the world's elite social engineers. For years, Desmious was tasked with the terrible job of testing and improving upon a corrupt system's most oppressive structures, not only the pieces of what he calls the ickthyfilaky, or the guarded prison, but also the gradual construction of something far more nefarious, a modern contrivance known by far fewer people as the melifilaky, or the honey prison.

Desmious always hated the melifilaky. He explained to me once that while both the spirit and the flesh will instinctively struggle against the far more obvious limitations of a conventional incarceration, the power of the honey prison lies in it's innocuous, seemingly beneficial, nature. As he watched the world slip further and further into the sticky snares of this seemingly undetectable threat, it was his sincere, almost religious, devotion to that delicate dance between capture and escape which, perhaps inevitably, compelled him to eventually betray the Conspiracy.

What follows, therefore, is a brief description of the seven primary members of this supposedly ancient and all consuming plot. Perhaps, like many, you'll simply refuse to believe in any evil consortium of Supervillians whom, in ways that will soon be made obvious, subtly rule the modern world, with very little, if any, opposition. At least at first, many of you probably won't even pause to consider how you, or your families, might, even now, be falling victim to any of these ubiquitous assaults on the human mind and body. Desmious says that this is because you have, in fact, become a living part of the prison itself, and thus can really never hope to escape; he taught me that we must instead escape from you.

I, however, remain hopeful, but, if he's right, then this may serve as your only notice that we are leaving, and, at least, you'll be granted a chance at understanding why. Ultimately, whether or not you come along, and who you might attempt to bring with you, will have to be entirely up to you and what you're capable of seeing.

This is, after all, where all proper escapes must begin.

(Unfortunately, illustrations for any of the following 7 Wanted posters have yet to be finalized. We live in hope.)

WANTED
THE SENEX
For Predatory Lending,
Extortion, Usury, and Fraud

The Senex, an ascended Alchemist, currently owns most of the planet Earth and exercises his royal prerogative via an unthinkably vast banking empire. He is the prime architect of an ancient occult conspiracy that stretches far back before the Order of Melchizadek (a.k.a. Jupiter), the Hashshashin, the Templars, The Freemasons, and, of course, the Federal Reserve, all of which currently answer to him. His intense rivalries with other Alchemical Masters of history, from St. Germain to Sir Issac Newton, are also legendary, although these days he mostly just locks promising Alchemists up, forcing them to slave away in secret for his bank.

Once, they say, he was quite literally made of gold, but these days, he's become a wispy digital whirl of swirling one and zeroes; the fundamental idea of ownership itself, extended out into infinity.

WANTED
MOTHER DREADFUL
For Poisoning Billions
and Political Corruption

The Senex's niece, Mother Dreadful, as the self-proclaimed goddess of the Oikos Panouklas, or 'the Household Plagues,' is responsible for GMOs, preservatives and artificial sweeteners, for fluoride, pesticides, heavy metals and dyes, for the over-processing and over-sweetening of the American diet, all of which has contributed to our current Functional Zombie Apocalypse. She is the matron of the Illuminati house Rothschild* (from whom she inherited, among other things, her tiny army of mind-controlling parasites which she's dubbed the “Determites”), but suffers from a psychological illness called Lamia Syndrome, thoroughly convinced that the world needs to be saved from itself by the cautious enlightenment, and natural selection, her various poisons bring.

WANTED
MEDIACRATES
For Subversion of the Fifth Estate
and Possibly Deicide

Mediacrates hunts those whom the Order of Jupiter deem a potential threat to the status quo, colloquially referred to as “sparks.” A bishop in the Catholic Church, this thin neuro-assassin commands enormous assets, both magical and mundane, including an army of conservative zealots, a quartet of archonic angels called the Drudge, and a vast media empire. All of these are part of his “Mediacratic Method,” a systematic process of indoctrination and bribery designed to neutralize the various threats posed by nonconformists and malcontents.

WANTED
SANTA CLAUS
For Consumerism,
Slave Labor and Xenocide

Santa Claus was once merely the bishop of Myra until he merged body and soul with a pagan God of Darkness called the Holly King, ascending to become the world's foremost guardian against all things supernatural and, more importantly, the modern God of Consumerism. He has a slave army of elves and satyrs and runs a magical prison sweat shop in the North Pole called “The Workshop.” Armed assaults on the Workshop are common, primarily by a single group of radical militants called the E.L.F. (the Elven Liberation Front). The goal of the E.L.F. is not just to liberate the various mythical creatures currently slaving away in the Santa's Workshop, but to release the long imprisoned God of Spring, the unfairly demonized Krampus.

WANTED
THE PALE WARDEN
For Mind Control

The Pale Warden is an alien who crafts various technological wonders, the primary focus of which are the enslavement, or at least the perpetual distraction, of the human mind. Her people are known on Earth as the Fae, and she's here on a mission to keep humans from somehow stumbling into any of the various dimensional rifts that connect her shining world to our own. Popular Pale Warden Technology throughout the ages has included such advances as the stage, the radio, the television, comic books, role-playing games, video games, the internet and most recently, her greatest success, smart phones.

WANTED
THE AUTHORITARIAN
For Police Brutality and
Countless Other Crimes of Conformity

The Authoritarian's power waxes and wanes in response to the amount of pain, fear, and resignation he can harvest from those whom he bends to his will. Part of this transformation is physical, as he often makes dramatic increases in size, strength, and speed, but he also has a large degree of telepathic influence over the sensory perceptions of anyone he's beaten into submission, controlling both what they can and cannot see. These mind-controlled fools become drones in his massive army of Conformatons, a humorless and superficial collection of petty tyrants, haters, snitches and apologists. It's not clear exactly what the Authoritarian is, but he has displayed a disturbing ability to inhabit the bodies of those under his dominion, and to survive indefinitely in spirit form should his own body be destroyed. He has, in the past, claimed to being nothing less than the actual God of the Old Testament, but, of course, this has never been verified.

WANTED
THE ULTIMA THULE
For High Treason and
the Corporate Conspiracy

The Ultima Thule has multiple forms: from the earliest robot prototypes it used to rely upon to substantiate its terrible existence, to the various modern avatars it now uses to travel freely across the internet, and even out into space, this Nazi God Machine is a vastly powerful artificial intelligence seeking nothing less than the perfect merger of business and government, a Neo-Fascist Corporatocracy. Unlike the Authoritarian, The Ultima Thule is a purely material phenomenon, a sentient computer program without any inherent ability to spiritually possess others or to persist beyond the destruction of it's physical hosts; unfortunately, copies of its core programing appear to be regularly backed up in secret locations all across the globe, making the Nazi God Machine effectively as indestructible and immortal as the Authoritarian himself.

Krampusmas is an ever expanding holiday season based on the Krampus's own indefatigable defiance of the darkness. It usually begins in earnest on December 5th, with the year's first official Krampuslauf, a decentralized “parade” which serves as a gathering for all those who wish to pledge themselves to the returning God of Light as we enter upon this delicate period of solar transition. Just over two weeks later, the Winter Solstice arrives, and with it comes "the Great Solstice Battle," which has traditionally been marked with various contests between the various agents of the light and of the dark, culminating in one last epic struggle between the Oak and the Holly Kings. This one sacred night is typically considered by most to be the actual “Krampusmas holiday,” but this well beloved season of defiance seems to arrive, at least for me, earlier and earlier, and to then stretch on for longer and longer, with every passing year.

Of course, beyond these two essential dates, any other of the more conventional holidays one might wish to acknowledge can be engaged in as each individual sees fit. However, for reasons that will momentarily be made clear, obligatory acts of mass consumerism are very strongly discouraged, and, whenever possible, should be replaced with actual acts of charity, preformed either anonymously or in the name of Krampus.

Yet who, you may ask, is the Krampus, and what's his beef with consumerism anyway? So glad that you asked.

The pre-Christian origins of the Krampus reach all the way back to the so-called Wildmen that were believed to preside over the initiatory binding and scourging of novice witches. The Krampus's infamous birch branches are in fact a very well known magical tool for the driving out of unclean spirits, and indeed, later day tales of "bad" children carried away in a sack could indicate a form of forced conscription into one of the many dark corners of the Supramundane, just as with the Chinese Linn Quei or the Irish Fae.

Yet, unquestionably, the Krampus's greatest and most defining role was preformed as the immortal God of Spring known as the Oak King. Each year, at the Winter Solstice, this God of Light battled and overthrew the God of Darkness and Winter, who appeared as a bearded and burly woodsman, complete with heavy black boots and a fur lined coat, known, at that time at least, as the Holly King.

However, with the arrival of the aptly named Dark Ages, a pagan slaying Catholic Bishop named Nicholas of Mira somehow assumed the immortal station of this ancient pagan arch-villain, and the once heroic Krampus found himself securely bound in heavy iron chains, forced to serve as a brutish boogeyman for his eternally entropic antagonist the Holly King, or rather, as he has now come to be known all around the world, the saccharine and sanctimonious Santa Claus.

From that time forward, this well concealed Dark God of winter and decay has been able to rule the entire world, year round, as the now uncontested God of Frenzied Mass Consumption. This, my friends, is the true story of Christmas, known only to a select few, though consistently intuited by millions. Yet fear not; the true God of Yule will soon return- on December 21st, to be precise.

So please, don't forget to sharpen your horns and, in whatever ways that you can, defy the darkness.

Simon Zealot is a recovering super villain now trying to help all of those insignificant common people he once sought to enslave and/or annihilate. He's the author of three books, The Shadow Society Guidebook, The Malakimae Manual and The Hermetic Grimoire of the Neo-Templar Order. He is also a special investigator, a martial arts instructor, an astrologer, a hypnotist, a fire performer, an escape artist, a world class mentalist, and, of course, one of the once conquered, but now returning, Djinn.